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hey guys welcome back to my channel welcome to today's video so we are going to be talking about essays today essay writing how i go about writing my essays my essay writing process what advice can i share everything to do with essays as i said so yeah i'm gonna try and make this video as useful as possible and i really hope you enjoy it definitely like it if you do so yeah if you are new around here i suppose i should give a bit of a background so i am currently studying for my master's in cancer biology at ucl i'm studying at ucl but i'm essentially at home and before that i did my undergrad at cambridge so for three years i studied biological natural sciences the majority of my assessments during my undergraduate and now in my master's are essay-based they're written and so i've been writing essays for quite a long time and obviously yes i am a biology student i'm hoping that this will apply to most other subjects and in terms of the structure of this video there are going to be three main sections so the first section is going to be the biggest and the longest section because that is going to be all about writing like big essays or if you're say working on like a dissertation or a big assignment so that will have every single step that i may go through and then the second section is going to be how i kind of go about writing practice essays that are not as long and that shouldn't take you as long to write and then thirdly i'm going to talk about exam essays and as you'll see as we go through the different sections in this video you'll see that with less time to complete an essay then i will start to omit certain steps but the overall process is still the same it's just that you have less time to do an essay and so you can't feasibly do everything or in as much detail so yeah without me talking too much at the start of this video we are going to jump straight in let me just adjust let's see okay so as i said we're starting with big essays big assignments for example when i was say writing my undergraduate dissertation or like now when i'm doing my master's coursework pieces okay so my first kind of phase involves like research and making notes so i will spend a lot of time looking over my lecture notes if it applies to the essay title and then i will source a lot of information myself so i would be doing a lot of searching online on the internet i will look for lots of papers essentially and then i will make a big document alongside with all of my notes compiled in one i don't hand write my notes because it just takes too much time and i like to synthesize all of the information and have it in one place i've never really had essential reading lists but if there is an essential reading list then i would make sure that i've read those if they've been recommended by the lecturer say but i focus on finding resources and information myself just because i don't just want to do what everyone else is doing i like to find my own information bring new ideas and different perspectives to the table to add to my discussion my essay and just enrich it as much as possible so i do spend a lot of time doing research and this will just depend on how much time i have to do the assignment and how big the kind of project is so for my dissertation for example i spent a lot of time reading like so much time and then now for like my master's assignments and stuff i don't have as long to complete them but i do make sure and prioritize the research phase because i do like to have a big breadth of knowledge and then i also like to dig into details of some papers specifically okay the second step step number two numero dos with my big document sometimes it's very long before i do anything else what i find is really quite important and it might not sound important but trust me it really makes a difference i will then take the time to go back over those notes i won't read everything word for word but i just make sure that i re-familiarize myself with the notes that i have compiled because it's really easy to lose sight of the bigger picture when you've done so much reading and you've read a lot of material you can feel a bit lost and it's easy to forget about your initial aim like what is the essay title what is the question you're trying to answer and then from a practical sense to help me do that as i'm reading those notes i won't just be passively reading them normally i will be emphasizing the key information so as i said i have my notes typed so i normally just put things in bold if i want to emphasize key information or keywords i won't introduce color at this point because i will use color coding a bit later to help me as well i may sometimes be handwriting some things at the same time for me that helps the information sink in as well okay the next thing we're gonna do is make a plan and i plan my essays in the form of a mind map so i'll put the question in the middle and then i put all of the key ideas floating around that mind map and it doesn't matter where the ideas are on that piece of paper at this point because what i then will do is i will start to draw links between the different sections and the different ideas because that is really going to help you with like the overall or the macro structure of your essay it's obviously really important to make sure that they're not just like a string of disjointed ideas they have to flow and your different paragraphs and sections have to link like there will be certain ideas in one section that very much link to another and so i will draw arrows between those sections and then i will normally start to number the different sections and put them in a logical order i will then start to pad out the different sections add the more detailed ideas for each of those sections or paragraphs of your essay it doesn't have to be too detailed i really don't make my plans like crazy busy mind maps because it's really overwhelming that's why you have your notes like your big research notes document is your source of information your mind map is just a very simplified overview of the structure of your essay that you're going to follow so yeah once you have done your research you have all your notes and you have this plan what i then tend to do is i will color code my notes so everything that i want to go in one section of my essay i will put in like purple and then everything for a different section i'll put in green you get the point i just color code my notes and as i said like all of this planning and stuff before you write the essay it's gonna take most of the time but trust me if you put time and effort into planning and into researching and stuff it will make essay writing so much easier and sometimes not all of your information from your research will be relevant for your essay so i would just make sure i am picking out the most relevant information and color coding it accordingly and you're really starting to get a feel for what your essay is going to look and sound like sort of thing if that makes sense okay so with all of that we're now going to talk about actually writing your essay sometimes if i'm feeling a bit risky or a bit of a rebel or a bit adventurous i might just sit down and i will launch into writing this essay and i won't really care too much about how it sounds the vocabulary that i'm using if it sounds all fancy i'll just write the essay but most of the time there is a little bit of a barrier to writing an essay you sit there for ages seconds minutes hours pass by and you end up writing like two sentences because you're just so worried and fixated on how it sounds and what you're writing and you chop and change things all the time and you're not happy with anything that you write so it does depend on what mood i'm in because if i'm in this kind of anxious mood and i'm just wanting it to be like perfect even though it's never going to be perfect then i just don't really get too far when i'm writing the essay but that is why i would say set yourself a dedicated time to start writing your essay like set an hour in your day or something to just start writing the essay set a timer say to yourself you're just going to write for half an hour for an hour and just see where you end up i really do try and say to myself look holly you just have to write this first draft it doesn't matter how bad or how good it is because you are going to tweak it you are going to change it you're going to do redrafts and stuff afterwards you just have to get something down in terms of actually writing your essay as i said before if you've got your plan and if you've color coded everything go to that information go to everything in orange and i will like paste that into the document that i'm writing my essay on and then i will read it and i will start to string it into ideas and put it all together everyone has a different writing style some advice that i would give though first of all i would say you need to definitely strike a balance between adding sufficient detail but not adding too much detail because it's very easy to get caught up in the details and it's very easy to just write the details and not keep in mind the bigger picture you need to add detail to show that you have the evidence but don't overwhelm the reader with too much detail because when you read it back it will be just so difficult to understand what you're actually trying to say what point you're trying to make here the second thing i would say is about the structure so not only does your overall structure need to make sense but your structure within your paragraphs also needs to be logical so yeah you have to kind of think about that macro structure and that micro structure within each paragraph i would also say that whenever you're writing just keep reminding yourself of the question or the essay title like what are you actually trying to achieve at the end of this don't not answer the question that is literally the worst thing you can do so that is probably my number one piece of advice make sure you do remind the reader of the point that you're making and why that answers the question that you've been asked as the essay title something that did change the game for me in terms of essay writing in my third year was the use of subheadings but not simply the use of like small subheadings like single words or something but questions as a subheading if you ask a question as a subheading then it makes you think about what you're trying to answer in that section and secondly it also helps the reader because when the reader reads that subheading they're like oh okay so she's trying to answer this question in this section sometimes this might not be feasible because sometimes you do have very tight word counts and so you don't have the scope to write your subheadings as questions but i use this for my dissertation i use it for very big assignments where the word count is not something ridiculously tiny even if you don't include the subheadings in your final essay you can always write them yourself and use them in your draft but then take them away afterwards it might just help you focus and answer the question as i said before the final thing i would say is that you are going to get better with practice and you're going to get better over time like don't expect the first essay that you've ever written to be a masterpiece and to be perfect the more you write and the more you practice and the more you read as well the better you will become and over time you will develop your own unique writing style trust me it will come with time so now you have your essay hopefully at this point the next thing i will do is i will make lots of re-drafts and especially for these bigger projects that is why i recommend starting early because i like to space out doing this for example say with my master's coursework at the moment say my deadline is next week and i've written my essay say today which is saturday and it's due on like i don't know wednesday next week i might do a re-draft every day up until the deadline i know that might sound a lot but trust me you want to be looking at your work with fresh eyes every time you do a redraft if possible and that means it's so much easier for you to spot mistakes to spot things you want to change it's so easy when you know your writing style to just read what you think you've written and not what you've actually written so definitely space out your redrafts that's the first thing i'm gonna say and yeah as i'm redrafting the things that i am constantly asking myself am i answering the question obviously you're looking for mistakes and also at this point it's really important to start condensing what you've written and really trying to make it as concise as possible ask yourself is this information redundant is it really necessary if you do have strict word counts this is so important i get rid of any redundant words like test yourself see if you can write a sentence in a shorter way in a more succinct way and the more you do that the better you will become at conveying your point and getting things across concisely and also you can reduce your word count so considerably just by removing like redundant words here and there it's really effective if you do it well and if you take the time as i said to make those redrafts so yeah that is basically the whole process and the final thing i want to say is obviously when you get feedback really do use the feedback think about the feedback absorb it and act on that feedback because trust me it is so so valuable the positive feedback is all great it's nice to hear you know that you've written a good essay but trust me you will learn so much more from the more critical feedback so i really do pay attention to that because you constantly want to improve you know so yeah now we're going to talk about shorter practice essays so i wrote so many of these in my final year of my undergraduate i was always practicing essay writing and writing more just to get more feedback and to just get better at it myself the steps are still exactly the same but i will omit some of them and i do them in a slightly different order so in this case with the short practice essays say you want to do an essay in four days the first thing i do is i will make the plan immediately because these practice essays as opposed to the bigger projects normally you can get more of your information from your lecture notes and you should have a better understanding of what content needs to go into that essay then secondly i will do my research and the reason why i'm doing my research here at this point is to pad out the knowledge so i will be mostly focusing on the lecture content as i said but i'm using my wider reading to pad it out and to bring new things to the table then i'm going to jump into writing the essay and then i'm going to move on to checking it you obviously won't be able to do as many redrafts but again it's important to proofread and to check it over and then i will submit it get the feedback act on the feedback and use it as i said before so that is the overall process again i cannot stress the importance of getting that critical feedback and with these practice essays they are practice essays for a reason like you're supposed to make the mistakes you're not supposed to get that top first class mark every single time or that distinction that you might be aiming for if anything i encourage you to make the mistakes at this point like it doesn't matter if you don't do as well in an essay because you're going to have learned so much more from that essay that's not as good and these are the times when you can you know branch out a bit and use maybe a different style of writing or try a different structure or try using subheadings or use subheadings as questions as i've suggested here don't be afraid to a make mistakes and be be a bit more creative or experimental or adventurous with the way you're writing okay the final section the third and final section of this video is all about exam essays so how do i write these what is the approach i take the big difference here with exam essays is that you are writing them from memory you don't have all of your notes to refer to unless it's like an open book exam which are becoming more and more common with online university and stuff like this but in this case if you are writing it from memory i often think that this can be a really good thing because as long as you know the information like you've learned stuff and you have stuff to write about because you don't have everything at your disposal and because you are time pressured it means that your answers are often more focused and to the point and concise because you can't add every single detail if you are faced with a choice of essay titles the first thing you need to do is spend the time choosing the most appropriate title for you firstly make sure you understand the titles which one do you say have a better grasp of which one do you know more about sort of thing ask yourself all of those questions i have made mistakes in the past in final year exams where i have chosen a title that was like the wrong one for me and i went to the extent of like starting the essay like writing the instruction and even a bit of the first paragraph and then after say 15 minutes i realized that that was not the essay title that i wanted to be answering and so i quickly switched but that was a waste of like 15 minutes like i have made those mistakes i made that big mistake once in one of my final year exams it's such a vivid memory because i just remember panicking and stressing which you should not do but i quickly changed the essay title that i wrote my essay wasn't as long as i wanted it to be but i still wrote a better essay i feel but yeah choose the title first of all and then what you're gonna do is you're gonna plan now the thing with essay planning in exams is i never used to do this i used to just jump straight into writing the essay sometimes i have done that and i am going to be honest because i have felt confident that i can just launch straight in and i can write an essay without having to plan it but that is normally the case when i've written a similar practice essay but if it is a newer title then do spend time planning and again i will use the mind map method you may have had before but if you do run out of time in an exam and you hand in your plan like don't throw away your plan make sure that you do hand in your plan as well because sometimes an examiner might see where you were going to go you just run out of time so don't throw your plan away then obviously i spend most of the time in an exam writing the actual essay make sure that you're asking yourself are you answering the question you know make sure it is focused and you're not just going off on a tangent it's okay to discuss ideas and to extrapolate a bit but don't deviate too much because it will just distract the reader and it will distract you and it won't be answering the question i in exam essays when there is no word limit and i'm handwriting things i will use the subheadings as questions i am also going to be honest here and say in terms of proofreading and checking essays and exam situations i rarely do it because i am normally writing up until the very end of the exam or up until the point when i need to switch to move on to another question if you see what i mean sometimes i will write a sentence and read it and just check it's making sense or like halfway through my essay i might just you know look back over what i've written and make sure there are no obvious mistakes content errors are the ones that you really want to avoid so in an essay like if i'm whizzing through writing things and if i'm getting to writing something that's really quite detailed i will make sure that i am writing the details correctly so if i check anything at the end it will be the names of things all the details because that's the content that i want to be getting correct i don't want to get things wrong the final thing to remember is that a longer essay does not mean it's a better essay i like to strike a balance between the two like have a high quality essay with enough written down to answer the question yeah quantity does not mean quality okay so i think that is everything i wanted to say about writing essays i don't know how long this video will be but as i said at the start i wanted it to be as detailed and comprehensive as possible and yeah as i said at the start if you did like this video if you found it useful definitely give it a thumbs up if you have any questions or other things you'd like me to talk about in similar videos feel free to leave a comment down below as usual and yeah if you want to stick around and subscribe you can hit the subscribe button and the bell so you know when i upload don't see as a writing as a daunting task even though sometimes it can be daunting and it might not be the most enjoyable thing but i really love writing essays because it's a chance for you to show an examiner or somebody marking your essay what you know and just have fun with it really i would just encourage having fun with writing essays but anyway i will speak to you as always very soon in another video until then i hope you stay safe and well and yeah i will speak to you very soon bye you